Justifying Inequality: A Cross-Temporal Investigation of U.S. Income Disparities and Just-World Beliefs from 1973 to 2006

This cross-temporal meta-analysis examined 6,120 American college students’ scores on the Belief in a Just World Scale (BJW; Rubin and Peplau, J Soc Issues 31(3):65–90, 1975) across the last three and a half decades. Drawing on models of belief threat, we examined whether the causal relationship between perceived injustice and increases in BJW could extend from the laboratory to society by using macro-economic injustice trends to predict changes in BJW across these decades. Specifically, we hypothesized that perceptions of inequality, operationalized as rising income disparities, would result in a greater need to justify this inequality and that this would be evidenced by increased commitment to just world beliefs over time. Consistent with this prediction, BJW scores increased significantly over time and this increase was positively related to increasing income disparities in society. Income inequality remained a significant predictor of BJW scores even after controlling for additional factors of general income and political ideology. Implications of increasing just world beliefs are discussed in terms of psychological and policy outcomes.     

The belief in an unjust world: An egotistic delusion

The main hypothesis of Lerner's just world theory says that people are inclined to think that their physical and social environment is just and that individuals generally get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Contrary to Lerner's assumption, however, it is suggested in the article that in some situations, people may perceive the world as unjust because such a belief has a specific ego-defensive compoment for an individual. It is likely, for instance, that the belief in an unjust world, though in itself a legitimate block to success, may be aggrvated in conditions diagnostic for competence and hence can be used as a special form of self-handicapping strategy. This assumption has been tested in a 2 (low vs. high tendency to engate in self-handicapping behaviors) x by 2 (low vs. high opportunity to use the belief in an unjust world as a self-handicapping strategy) experiment. The results of the study fully supported the author's predictions.     

White-collar crime and the justice department: The institutionalization of a concept

The sudden and unexpected incorporation of white-collar crime as a top investigative priority of the U.S. Justice Department of the 1970s is the focus of this inquiry. This pursuit of white-collar crime is especially problematic for instrumentalist and structuralist variants of conflict theory, which generally view the origins of law in terms of the interests of a ruling or capitalist class. This apparent contradiction between official concern for white-collar crime and instrumentalist and structuralist theories of law creation is examined in the context of the discovery of white-collar crime by the Justice Department. It is noted that in the process of operationalizing white-collar crime, the Justice Department transformed the traditional (Sutherland) definition of white-collar crime so that targeted offenders are not limited to the economic and political elite, but instead are drawn from all social classes. This modification of the definition has far-reaching implications for assessing the nature of the Justice Department's response to the problem of elite crime and provides insight into the ongoing theoretical debate on the origins of law.     

From underworld to underground

In the West economically motivated crime is usually perceived as a matter for the police while the performance of the economy is a matter for the political authorities. This paper argues that the growth and evolution of the modern underground economy has made such a distinction obsolete. Not only have the frontiers between the legitimate and the criminal sectors of the economy blurred, but the distinction between the explicitly criminal and the merely informal aspects of the modern underground economy has become largely meaningless. Given the tremendous growth of underground activity, this means that the issue must now be addressed not just on the enterprise level, as a police matter, but on the level of the economy as a whole, by economic policy makers. This in fact is something that many developing countries long ago realized. The paper therefore asks whether developing countries have been any more successful in using monetary, fiscal and balance of payments policy to mitigate the adverse social and economic impact of widespread underground economic activity than have Western countries who have relied mainly on the sanction of criminal law. It concludes that both approaches are deficient in so far as they neglect the degree to which modern underground activity can no longer be seen as a manifestation of deviant economic behavior so much as a virtual economic insurgency against the status quo distribution of income and wealth and the codes of economic behavior which accompany it. However dramatic are the financial manifestations of the spread of enterprise crime, ultimately the challenge it poses must be addressed as the political and ideological level.     

Enemies Everywhere: Terrorism, Moral Panic, and US Civil Society

Since the attacks of September 11th, 2001, terrorism has experienced a prominence in discourse across the U.S. The representations of terrorists and terrorism by the news media and politi have contributed to the edifice of terrorism as a moral panic. This treatise examines the social effects that have or may occur due to the social construction of a moral panic of terrorism. The thematic frame is situated within Cohens stages of a moral panic. We offer an analysis of the medias depiction and coverage of acts of terrorism, and legislative, political and legal responses in the form of social and cultural changes occurring from the creation of a moral panic. In addition, we offer an analysis of the states vested interest in the social construction of this panic, leading to increased levels of fear, targeted at the general publics consciousness. This article concludes that the presentation of terrorism and terrorists by the media and politi have contributed to unnecessary levels of panic and fear, misguided public consciousness, and the development of legislation creating negative social ramifications yet be seen.     

The statistical prediction of violent behavior

Considerable attention in the popular and professional literature has focused on the relative costs and benefits of using public protectionist versus civil libertarian models of social control. In this article, we develop statistical analogs of these models to predict violent behavior among samples of defendants found incompetent to stand trial in New York State. The societal and personal costs (errors of prediction) of each model are compared and their implications for clinical practice and social policy are discussed.This research was supported in part by PHS Grant MH 20367 from the NIMH Center for Studies of Crime and Delinquency. The assistance of Thomas Arvanites in data analysis and the comments of Monroe Lefkowitz and Mary Evans Melick on earlier drafts of this paper are gratefully acknowledged.     

Equity,relative deprivation,and the value consensus paradox

This paper addresses the question of why respondents, when asked to specify an income they would be willing to accept as just, settle for an amount that, in most case, does not deviate strongly from what they actually receive. The phenomenon is illustrated by data from West Germany. It is argued that relative deprivation theory must be extended to incorporate processes of social hierarchy perception because inasmuch as this perception is contorted it creates illusory justice evaluations. Empirical evidence of misperceiving social distributions is given by social grading studies based on large German samples. The structural causes of the distributional misperceptions are discussed, one of these causes being the value consensus paradox, i.e., the paradox that, in a stratified society, value consensus will produce different social perceptions.     

The structure of basic human rights

This paper offers a theory of the structure of basic human rights which is both compatible with and clarificatory of the traditional conception of such rights. A central contention of the theory is that basic rights are structurally different from other kinds of moral rights, such as special rights, because of differences both in the way in which basic rights have content and the model on which basic rights are correlative with duties. This contention is exploited to develop and defend the central thesis of the theory, namely that basic human rights are bundles of mutually held active rights enjoyed by persons in virtue of the specifiable moral relationships they bear to each other.     

Satanism: Myth and reality in a contemporary moral panic

In the last decade, there have been many allegations about the prevalence of occult or Satanic criminality, which is believed to be involved in many offenses ranging from vandalism to child abuse and serial murder. Some have advocated the creation of specialized police units to combat the supposed threat. On the other hand, most of the alleged evils are very poorly substantiated, and highly questionable statements have been widely circulated. In fact, the current concern about the occult appears to have all the hallmarks of a classic moral panic, where a peripheral issue is suddenly perceived as a major social menace. This paper discusses the limited foundation of truth underlying the present crime-wave; and suggests that the panic reflects the moral and political agenda of extremists from the fundamentalist religious Right. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** AW502017 00005     

Nobody Knows Best: Alternative Perspectives on Forest Management and Governance in Southeast Asia

In this paper we propose a framework for understanding how dominant perspectives, or worldviews, influence the crafting of institutions, and how these, in turn, constrain the functions and goals of knowledge systems. Alternative perspectives carry their own set of assumptions and beliefs about who should be making the rules, where the best knowledge lies to guide decisions, and about where more knowledge is needed. Initially, four contrasting perspectives are elaborated: state-, market-, greens-, and locals-know-best. We illustrate the framework by exploring the recent history of forest governance in Southeast Asia, finding several examples of battles of perspectives leading to a new dominant perspective. In each case the dominant perspective itself, old or new, is shown to be defective in some critical way and was, or should be, replaced. The problem is that each of the perspectives considers the world as knowable, manageable, and relatively constant, or at most changing only slowly. Ecological and socio-political crises, however, are recurrent. Management plans and regulations or policies that aim to establish the land-use allocation, the best crop, the best forest management system or the best price or system of incentives, are doomed to failure. If uncertainties are accepted as fundamental, solutions as temporary, and scientific knowledge as useful but limited, then Nobody Knows Best is a modest, but effective heuristic for forest governance.     

Distributive and procedural justice in the workplace

The interrelatedness of procedural and distributive justice has implications for organizational practice, especially in the area of performance appraisal. I explore these implications by first describing how procedures can influence perceptions of distributive justice: Procedural improprieties can bring to mind the possibility that a more just outcome might have been obtained if only more acceptable practices had been followed. Next I discuss a second form of interrelatedness — how distributive consequences can influence perceptions of procedural justice — by suggesting that the fairness of a procedure can be assessed in terms of its expected-value (typical or most probable) outcome. These points are illustrated by a discussion of howvoice, or the opportunity for employees to contribute information during the performance appraisal process, can affect both appraisal accuracy and perception of fairness.     

Psychology,law, and the black community

Summary The present paper presented key applications of psychology and the law to the black community, embracing both civil and criminal law and legislation. The breadth of its focus preluded a more in-depth treatment of other areas relevant to black people which include issues related to psychiatric emergencies and involuntary hospitalization, child custody, and right-to-treatment litigation in prison and mental health facilities. In focusing attention on these applications and areas for activity, hopefully, I have not presented an unrealistic depiction of a responsive, socially sensitive, legal system capable and willing to exercise its powerful tools in the interest of the black community. To the contrary, there is considerable literature that identifies the historic role of the legal system in the enactments of laws to institutionalize and cement slavery, its failure to aggressively protect constitutional and civil rights of blacks, in imposing penalties differentially to blacks and whites in the criminal justice system, and more recently, conspiracies of law enforcement officials to deprive blacks of basic civil rights (Bell, 1975; Burns, 1973; Higgenbotham, 1973). The legal system, rather than being an effective instrument for justice and positive social changes, has often been a major source of racism. Thus, any meaningful attempts by lawyers or behavioral scientists in the interest of black people cannot ignore the racism that is embedded in the fabric of the legal profession and the behavioral sciences. Particular aspects of the law with significant social-psychological dimensions are: the cultural inertia, the archaicness of the law due to its roots in English common-law, historic and contemporary racism, conservatism associated with the principle of stare decisis, judicial elitism, and the substitution of administrative and judicial discretion for overt racism. Thus, in order for the legal system, or the field of psychology, to be reponsive to the needs of blacks and other oppressed groups, they must eradicate racism and injustice in their own ranks.Traditionally law has functioned as the hand maiden of the propertied class in our society. So it was to be expected that lawyers in the legislative halls, lawyers on the bench and lawyers in the executive branch of government would combine their talents to perpetuate by law this peculiarly American doctrine of racism predicated upon a claimed color inferiority.     

Does commitment affect the meaning of fairness?: Commonality and stability of fairness criteria in a political setting

This study explored political fairness criteria in Japan: examining their commonality and stability. Respondents were divided into three groups according to their commitment to the incumbent Government, as measured by neutrality, trust, and respect. Regression analyses revealed that Procedural Fairness was the commonly used criterion in judging the total fairness of the consumption tax. Citizens' commitment affected fairness criteria and their relative weights. Another regression analysis was performed to examine the meaning of procedural fairness. A comparison with our previous study (Takenishi and Takenishi, 1990) indicated that the procedural fairness criteria remained stable: however, voice became a criterion because of the Government's campaign. Results suggested than democratic ethicality, which consists of social values and beliefs, was important.Each author contributed equally.     

More on Ultimate and Immanent Justice: Results from the Research Project “Justice as a Problem within Reunified Germany”

In earlier studies it was shown that two domain-specific variates of belief in a just world, namely belief in immanent justice and belief in ultimate justice concerning severe illness, differ systematically and significantly. Only immanent justice leads to accusation and derogation of innocent victims while ultimate justice is concordant with positive evaluations of victims and helping behavior. With regard to the research project Justice as a Problem within Reunified Germany (GiP, from the German Gerechtigkeit als innerdeutsches Problem), two new scales were developed for purposes of measuring general belief in immanent and ultimate justice. Using a sample of 929 West Germans and 1,275 East Germans, some of the correlation patterns found in earlier studies could be replicated. For example, immanent justice did correlate with draconian judgments (the proneness to strict and severe judgments), while ultimate justice was associated with mildness. Only ultimate justice correlated with existential guilt about the underprivileged. Beside this confirmation of earlier findings, new correlation patterns were revealed. For example, only immanent justice correlated with the equity principle, whereas ultimate justice corresponded to the need and equality principles.     

Societal and Managerial Implications of Implicit Social Cognition: Why Milliseconds Matter

This article argues for the vulnerability of managerial work to unintended forms of racial and other bias. Recent insights into implicit social cognition are summarized, highlighting the prevalence of those mental processes that are relatively unconscious and automatic, and employed in understanding the self and others. Evidence from a response-time measure of implicit bias, the Implicit Association Test, (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz, 1998) illustrates this phenomenon. Recent work on the predictive validity of the IAT demonstrates that social cognitive pitfalls threaten a) managers' explicit commitments to egalitarianism and meritocracy and b) managers' performance in their three primary roles of processing information, interacting with others, and making decisions (Mintzberg, 1973). Implicit bias influences managerial behavior in unexpected ways, and this influence is heightened in the messy, pressured, and distracting environments in which managers operate.     

Justifying law: An explanation of the deep structure of American law

Conclusion Charles Darwin argued that human beings are what happen whenphysical laws act upon a planet with the characteristics that earthhad five billion years ago. Similarly, I have argued that theprimacy of individual will is what eventually happens when asociety allocates and limits coercion based upon rights. From timeto time particular visions of the good or the right dominate publicbehavior, but they are eventually enframed by rights — the authoritative claim of each person to respect.I have argued that the propositional structure of American law—the laws themselves — can be seen to be a logically consistentsystem of propositions stemming from the axiom that the will ofeach person is worthy of respect. This is an explanatory, not anormative, proposition. The axiom was not put there by anyoneand the law derived from it, any more than the human brian wasput there and the theory of relativity derived from it. The axiomcame to be embodied in k because of a fact — the single universalcharacteristic of human beings that is relevant to the question ofarranging coercion is individual will — and a process — the right ofeach person to demand a justification for coercion used upon him.Since will is universal to human beings, this would suggest thatany rights-based legal system would evince a general structuresimilar to our own. Particularities of national culture, naturalresources, population density, and so on would produce a verydifferent liberty frontier from the one facing this country andhence, different laws. But the general structure of law — the relationship between principle and policy decision, the role of thebasic rights, and so on — should be similar. This similarity shouldprovide a common basis for cooperation between states, transcending particularities of economic structure, political structure and ideology. We have seen that a very broad range ofeconomic and political institutions may be justified. The essential difference between states lies not in the different ways that theyarrange institutions but in the different ways that they justifythem. Those that justify them to people as persons are similar.Those that justify them by conformity to a design are different.The theory set out here is not a design. It is an explanation. Onevirtue of explanations is that they draw forth other explanations.More importantly, they offer perspective — they tell us what weare up to. As the social relations which law must rationalizebecome ever more complex, perspective becomes ever more necessary. The simple laws have already been written. The connectionbetween the doctrine of consideration and the first principle isobvious. The connection between the hard look doctrine ofreviewing administrative agencies and the second principle isnowhere near so obvious (though it is a lovely example of thejudicial process enframing the realm of uncertainty). The morecomplex and artificial the institution, the poorer the guidance ofintuition and the more necessary are conscious guides to decision.Justification comes easy to printers. Most of them don't knowwhy a page of print that has straight margines left and right isjustified. They don't need to know, for the idea has immediateintuitive appeal; it is easy to accept and to remember, and, onceremembered, it is an effective guide to behavior. It is easy to seethat this line of print is not justified and to do somethingabout it. It is not so easy to tell whether the hard look doctrine orthe enforcement of a surrogate motherhood contract sits fairly on itspage. Justification of law requires an understanding of thecriterion against which it is being done. There is an intuitive core— a sense — to any act of judgment, but that core can be illuminated and developed by an understanding of the framework withinwhich it operates.     

The insurgent economy: Black market operations of guerrilla organizations

This paper is a study of the finances of insurgent groups. It takes the view that a model guerrilla movement evolves through three stages, with corresponding changes in both its expenditure responsibilities and its fundraising activities.In the earliest stage it engages in hit-and-run operations against individual symbols of the state, either officials or isolated institutions like police stations and army outposts. At that stage, the group's expenditure requirements are relatively small and mainly military. Hence, it can rely on fundraising activities based on similarly sporadic and predatory actions such as bank robbery and kidnapping that closely approximate the activities of blue-collar criminals.In the next stage the guerrilla movement begins openly disputing the political power of the state, mainly through the conduct of low intensity war against the infrastructure of the formal economy. The guerrilla group's expenditure obligations are not only much greater in absolute amounts, but also include a rising social security component, for the care of dependents of its militants, as well as providing some assistance to the population whose support it is attempting to win. Fundraising therefore shifts from once-for-all, predatory operations to parasitical ones that yield a steadier, more dependable flow of income at the expense of the formal economy. The most important will be the revolutionary taxation of income and wealth, an activity that more closely approximates that of an organized crime group.In the final stage the guerrilla movement succeeds in implanting itself firmly on a piece of territory from which the state is effectively excluded. To its obligations for military operations and social security for dependents of militants are added those arising from the provision of social services to the general population of the controlled area and the building of the infrastructure necessary for the growth and development of a parallel economy. The most important sources of revenue come from indirect taxation — sales taxes on domestic commerce and/or export and import taxes on foreign trade along with user fees for the public services the insurgent group is providing. Fundraising thus ceases to be parasitical with respect to the formal economy controlled by the state and becomes symbiotic with the emerging parallel economy controlled by the guerrilla group.Although at any point the guerrilla movement may find itself with a temporary surplus of operating funds, it is in the symbiotic stage, with regular revenue flows, that problems of asset management are likely to become significant. Therefore, at this stage, while fundraising activities take on increasingly overt and legitimate-looking forms in areas under the group's governance, fund-man-agement activities require the guerrilla group to interface with the formal and international economy in much the same manner as white collar crime, seeking to hide and launder the returns from its fundraising.     

Belief in a Just World as a Resource of Victimized Students

In a cross-sectional questionnaire study with N?=?2593 German students, aged between 12 and 17 years (M?=?14.1, SD?=?0.5), we investigated the relation between students’ personal belief in a just world (BJW) and their victimization in bullying situations. According to the just-world theory and research, we expected that the more strongly the students endorsed the personal BJW, the less likely they were to report being victimized by other students. We aimed to extend previous findings that failed to confirm this negative relation by considering students’ personal experience of teacher justice as a possible mediator in this relation, while statistically controlling for sex and school type. We further considered the nested data structure with regard to school classes in our analyses. The results of latent mediation analyses at the individual and group levels showed that the more the students endorsed personal BJW, the more they evaluated their teachers’ behavior toward them personally as being just, and the less likely they were to report that they were bullied. However, the students’ personal experience of teacher justice did not mediate the relation between personal BJW and victimization at the individual or group level when controlled for sex and school type. We discussed the adaptive functions of BJW and implications for future school research and practice.     

Justice Beliefs in School: Distinguishing Ultimate and Immanent Justice

This paper combines two recent developments in just world research: the conception of belief in a just world (BJW) as a resource for coping and well-being in everyday life, and the distinction between two different facets of BJW, namely belief in immanent justice (BIJ) and belief in ultimate justice (BUJ). Moreover, these two aspects are adapted to the school context and educational psychology. Scales for measuring ultimate and immanent justice in schools were developed within a German pilot reform project with a sample of 1274 pupils. The two facets could be distinguished by means of factor analysis. The reliability of the two scales is satisfactory, and their validity is confirmed by their differential correlational patterns. Results show that not every form of BJW automatically functions as a coping resource. In fact, only BUJ is able to protect pupils' mental well-being, whereas immanent justice can actually jeopardize well-being. Similarly, BUJ is associated with the perception of solidarity and learning enjoyment in class, whereas BIJ is more closely associated with the experience of rivalry and competition in class. Finally, the socialization of the two justice beliefs is considered. The cross-sectional data provide some evidence to suggest that friendly and supportive parenting styles can promote BUJ, whereas strict parenting styles may further BIJ. More longitudinal research is needed to obtain further insights into these phenomena.     

How Large Should the Strike Zone Be in “Three Strikes and You're Out” Sentencing Laws?

So-called three strikes and you're out sentencing laws for criminal offenders have proliferated in the United States. The laws vary considerably in their definitions of what constitutes a strike. This paper adapts the classic Poisson process model of criminal offending to investigate how varying sentence lengths and definitions of what constitutes a strike affect the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of these sentencing laws. In particular, it asks whether, by using different definitions for the first, second, and third strikes or different sentence lengths, one can make the resulting incarceration more efficient in the sense of incapacitating more crimes per cell-year served.